A few days ago, thanks to my algorithmic recommendations — not from the sources I usually read, but selected on the basis of subject matter of interest to me — I came across an article about a 57-year-old American who after being released following a 37-year jail term, was asked about his impressions of something as commonplace as a smartphone, or the internet.

The man entered prison at the age of 20, in 1983, when a cell phone weighed more than a kilo and was bigger than a brick, and when no one outside military or very academic circles had…

As we begin to see the end of the pandemic and the normalization of labor relations it’s worth thinking about the future of a habit many of us have developed over the last year: videoconferencing.

Services such as Zoom are now the channel many of us now use to communicate with each other: what was unthinkable before the pandemic and reserved for very specific issues, is now an option used by many on a daily basis. At the beginning of the pandemic, the company enjoyed a huge increase in growth thanks to being in the right place at the right…

One of the most common complaints of internet users is the feeling of being spied on. In response, the New York Times is suggesting its readers use browsers such as Brave that offer greater privacy in the face of intrusive advertising.

The strategy of advertising things we have previously shown an interest in by searching or reading on another seemingly unrelated page hasn’t worked for a long time, if it ever did. Fed up with being hassled at every turn, people are increasingly hostile to the approach.

What is it specifically we don’t want, and what should we do to…

I’ve been keeping an eye on the use of machine learning algorithms, particularly by venture capitalists, to make investment decisions for some time now. They’ve been investing in machine learning companies for years, so applying their products to other businesses, once you have studied how they work, seems a reasonable proposition.

After all, what is the decision to invest in a startup based on? Basically, the fruit of a set of analyses and previous experiences that can be systematized and verified in different ways, while the experience corresponds, in reality, to the imperfect distillation, with its biases and errors, of…

In the wake of 2015’s dieselgate scandal, Volkswagen’s image was sorely in need of a makeover. The company’s brutal attack on the principles of corporate social responsibility made it for some time a pariah in the eyes of much of the public, although its sales were never affected.

So Volkswagen’s management decided to commit to electrification, based on the belief that if it didn’t it would “end up like Nokia”. In a bid to avoid fines resulting from the change in emissions standards planned for this year, Volkswagen said goodbye to hybrids in 2019, accelerated its electric vehicle manufacturing targets…

The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is talking to Discord about acquiring the social audio company created in 2015, that has more than 250 million users and has so far focused primarily on creating communities of video game fans.

The trigger for these talks has been the surprise success of Clubhouse, which is even smaller than Discord, but continues to enjoy strong growth as it turns the social audio scene upside down. The Clubhouse story is the definition of momentum as described by Jean Claude Larréché in “The Momentum Effect”: a start-up that manages not only to find a…

Squaring the circle, the task of constructing with a ruler and a compass a square that has an area equal to that of a given circle, is one of those great unsolvable mathematical problems.

Telegram now has half a billion active users worldwide, and its creator, Pavel Durov, is a particularly brilliant and highly motivated person who seems capable of solving pretty much any problem. Since its launch in August 2013, Telegram has enjoyed steady growth, funded entirely by its founder, who left his previous creation, the Russian social network VK, with $300 million in his pocket.

In short, everything…